WhatsApp is keen to stand out amongst its rivals as more than just a messaging app. In an effort to promote its additional features, it has announced some impressive figures in regard to its voice-calling function, which was rolled out just over a year ago.

The app states that its users across iOS and Android now make 100 million calls a day. WhatsApp did the math and worked out that totals a whopping 1,100 calls a second.

The numbers are notable, but hardly surprising. After all, the app boasts 1 billion users, making it the biggest chat platform in the world. It only became a comprehensive communications platform by adding VoIP in April of last year, playing catch up with the likes of Skype, and Viber.

Since its acquisition by Facebook for a staggering $22 billion in 2014, WhatsApp has continued to operate independently under the leadership of co-founder and CE Jan Koum.

Despite dominating the overseas market — in particular India, Brazil, and Africa — WhatsApp is still struggling to gain a foothold in the U.S. where it faces stiff competition from apps including Facebook Messenger, and iMessage. America is high on Koum’s global domination agenda. In fact, he wants everyone who owns a smartphone to use WhatsApp.

“We’re nowhere near that,” Koum told USA Today. “But we hope that over a certain period of time we will get that critical mass.”

WhatsApp is no stranger to mass usage. At present, its users send 42 billion messages, 1.6 billion photos, and 250 million videos each day. So how exactly does Koum plan to overcome the U.S. stumbling block? As always, he’s relying on organic growth.

“As long as our user base continues to grow, at some point it will have critical mass, and at some point it will tip and at some point people will just have to use WhatsApp because their friends are using WhatsApp,” states Koum.

Happily for the rest of the world, unlike thought leaders, real human beings know that social media in the workplace is still basically a way to goof off. That’s according to a new survey by Pew Research Center, which polled 2,003 adults last September to find out how they use social media at work.

Overall, 34% of respondents said they use social media to “take a mental break” or goof off, while 27% said they use it to “connect with friends and family” or goof off. By contrast, just 24% said they use it to make professional connections, and 20% said they use it to build or strengthen personal relationships with coworkers.

Connecting with coworkers on social media isn’t necessarily an unalloyed positive: while 14% of respondents said they found information on social media that improved their opinion of a coworker, a slightly larger proportion, 16%, said they found information that lowered their opinion (finding out your cubicle neighbor is a Tila Tequila fan = grounds for mental health leave). Both proportions are higher among younger workers, with 23% of workers ages 18-29 saying they found positive information and 29% negative information.

So what do bosses think about all this? Screw ‘em! 77% of respondents said they use social media without regard to any official workplace policy, which may or may not exist, regarding social media. To the degree that social media policies are in place, they may actually have a chilling effect on social media for “enterprise” purposes: just 16% of employees at workplaces with social media policies say they use it for getting work-related information, compared to 25% at workplaces without social media policies.

Targeted messages in physical stores based on beacons and online data are becoming more prevalent and accurate. Consumers are a little creeped out at the prospect of retailers using technologies like facial recognition to identify them, but they don't mind if retailers link a search on their phone to a coupon or discount.

RichRelevance Wednesday released its second annual "Creepy or Cool" survey of U.S. consumers. The 2016 study of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers found shoppers expect to use their mobile phones as part of the store experience, but they are not ready to participate in a real-life Minority Report scenario.

Some 67% of American consumers use their mobile phone to shop, and the use skews higher for the younger shopping demographic, ages 18 to 29, with 79% shopping on their mobile phone.

Some 73% use their mobile phone to research and review products while they are shopping in the aisles, and 23% use it frequently while shopping. Here again, younger shoppers are more likely to turn to their mobile phones, with 84% using their mobile phone in the store.

Age has become a major factor. Millennials express stronger opinions on both creepy and cool features. Facial recognition technology that identify the individual as a high-value shopper and relays this information to a salesperson is definitely creepy. In fact 67% call this tech creepy, with Millennials skewing higher at 71%.

The world of IoT and connected objects in the home continues to heat up with the all-in-one connected couch, Marty.

Created by Havas Group and just showcased at Cannes, Marty is the epitome of merging media devices into a single point of control, as well as collecting all of the associated use data.

Marty is the first prototype to come out of also newly announced Havas 18/35, which is a combination of an innovation and fabrication lab and will house the group’s other innovation initiatives Lab 18, Collab and Innovation Lab.

The goal of Marty is to collect mass amounts of rich data and analyze it in order to help brands better serve consumers in the future, according to Havas.

“Currently, 80% of media interactions take place on a couch,” said Raphael de Andreis, chairman and CEO of Havas Group France. “The couch is the nerve center of media use, a place of individual and family habits involving all kinds of behaviors centered on free time, communication and work. And that makes it a fantastic research lab covering all touchpoints.”

Included, or connected, to the couch are the various devices used to consume media today.

For the cutting-edge media experiences, Marty also includes exclusive tactile sensations technology through the form of synchronized massage from startup Aurasens.

In total, Marty includes 15 connected devices and services.

Aggregating all of these connections and controls is a custom-designed app that acts as a media dashboard for the consumer.

The edge for marketers and advertisers, however, is in the data behind the app.

In collecting and analyzing behavioral data, Marty can custom tailor the content served to consumers based on contextual relevance of their behavior, mood and preferences. In doing so, Havas says Marty potentially could help companies achieve more accurate emotion-driven marketing.

The Dango app is named for a Japanese dessert consisting of sweet dumpling balls on a skewer (and yes, there’s an emoji for it). It sits atop other communication apps like Slack, Snapchat, or the built-in texting app on your phone. It suggests emoji that it thinks fit well with what you’re typing or in response to what someone just typed to you. You tap on the suggestion to add to the conversation.

Rather than simply coming up with word associations (such as a chicken emoji if you type “chicken”), Dango uses deep-learning techniques to try to figure out what whole sentences are expressing and then give you suggestions it thinks are related. For instance, if you type “She said yes!” Dango will show you the emoji for a ring and a bride with veil, among others.

Xavier Snelgrove, Whirlscape’s cofounder and chief technology officer, says Dango has been trained by scanning posts on Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter. The app only works on Android phones for now, since Apple doesn’t allow software developers to build such a tool, Snelgrove says; if it were on the iPhone, it would have to be part of a keyboard app. Separately, Whirlscape does sell a keyboard app called Minuumthat includes emoji prediction, but it’s doing simple word association.